mySociety blog » archive for 2010

Councils all around England have been busy getting ready to comply with the new duty to provide e-Petitions which kicks in today, 15th December. This means that on council sites across England you should now be able to make petitions which will be formally considered by the councils, in accordance with their chosen policies.

At mySociety we’ve spent a lot of time over the last twelve months helping councils to cope with this new duty by offering  them a commercial petitions service that is really good for users and easy to administer for councils. Some of the sites have been live for months, but many of the 35 council e-petitions sites we’re currently contracted to supply launch today.

mySociety’s core developers Matthew Somerville and Dave Whiteland deserve huge credit for all the work they did re-purposing the No10 Petitions codebase and doing dozens of council customisations and rebrands. I’ve just seen one council officer email “Yippeee” at the prospect of launching, so I reckon they’ve done a pretty good job  - well done gents, everyone in mySociety owes you a debt of gratitude for a time consuming job well done.

Here’s the current list of live local petitions sites. We’ll be adding more as they go up. Happy petitioning!

Ashfield http://petitions.ashfield-dc.gov.uk/

Barnet http://petitions.barnet.gov.uk

Barrow http://petitions.barrowbc.gov.uk/

Bassetlaw http://petitions.bassetlaw.gov.uk/

Blackburn with Darwen http://petitions.blackburn.gov.uk/

East Cambridgeshire http://petitions.eastcambs.gov.uk/

East Northants http://petitions.east-northamptonshire.gov.uk

Elmbridge http://petitions.elmbridge.gov.uk

Forest Heath http://petitions.forest-heath.gov.uk

Hounslow http://petitions.hounslow.gov.uk

Ipswich http://petitions.ipswich.gov.uk

Islington http://petitions.islington.gov.uk

Lichfield http://petitions.lichfielddc.gov.uk

Mansfield http://petitions.mansfield.gov.uk/

Melton http://petitions.melton.gov.uk/

New Forest http://petitions.newforest.gov.uk

Nottinghamshire http://petitions.nottinghamshire.gov.uk

Reigate & Banstead http://petitions.reigate-banstead.gov.uk

Runnymede http://petitions.runnymede.gov.uk

Rushcliffe http://petitions.rushcliffe.gov.uk/

South Holland http://petitions.sholland.gov.uk

Spelthorne http://petitions.spelthorne.gov.uk

St Edmundsbury http://petitions.stedmundsbury.gov.uk

Stevenage http://petitions.stevenage.gov.uk

Suffolk Coastal http://petitions.suffolkcoastal.gov.uk/

Surrey County Council http://petitions.surreycc.gov.uk

Surrey Heath http://petitions.surreyheath.gov.uk

Tandridge http://petitions.tandridge.gov.uk

Waveney http://petitions.waveney.gov.uk

Waverley http://petitions.waverley.gov.uk

Wellingborough http://petitions.wellingborough.gov.uk

Westminster http://petitions.westminster.gov.uk

Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead http://petitions.rbwm.gov.uk

Woking http://petitions.woking.gov.uk

How would you like to be a coder in an organisation that is as determined to make a difference in the world as it is to be a truly high quality, engineer-led software team?

mySociety is that organisation. We’re a project of a registered charity, currently running award-winning civic and democratic websites like TheyWorkForYou.com and FixMyStreet.com, and we’re looking to grow our already-celebrated development team by several new members over the next six months.

We’re looking for people with at least two years experience (professional or keen amateur) in at least one of Python, Ruby, Perl, PHP, C++, Javascript or Adobe Flex, and who have ambitions to learn more languages in the future.

We’re looking for developers willing to commit to full or mostly-full time positions (no freelancers, sorry) and who are up for a career change that will see them stay with us for a little while. You’ll get to work with volunteers, mix commercial and charitable projects, and travel far and wide. Plus, you can work from wherever you live (in the UK), and we pay salaries from £28k to £50k depending on skills.

Most of all, we’re looking for coders who look at the services we have built so far and think “I wish I’d been on that project”. Projects you’ll likely be working on over the next few months include (but are not limited to):

• A/B testing and conversion tracking of our charitable sites
• Commercial spinoffs from FixMyStreet
• Mapumental
• Enhancements to TheyWorkForYou and WhatDoTheyKnow
• Commercial development for clients

We’re looking to speak with possible candidates continually over the next few months, with a view to hiring two developers now and two more later in the year. Please send us your CV if you’re interested – the address is hello@mysociety.org and the subject line needs to be msjob6. The first round closing date is 10am on Monday 21st February, but CVs received after this deadline will still be considered for the next round of hiring.

And if you’ve any questions, please post them in the comments below so we can share the answers.

One of the most popular features on TheyWorkForYou is the plain English, non-judgemental vote analyses on MP pages that say things like “voted strongly against introducing a smoking ban“.  We call these ‘policies’, and they are authored by skilled people using the volunteer run PublicWhip website.

Making each one of these policies is a painstaking task, requiring good knowledge of how the Parliamentary voting system works, good writing skills, patience, and the strength of character not to let your own views about the issues cloud the analysis. It is of utmost importance to both mySociety and our users that these policies are fair and trustworthy.

Earlier this year we started to update the process by which we made new policies to make it even more rigorous, which we wrote about here. Marcus Fergusson and Stephen Young came onboard and did sterling work, but they have now moved on to greater things, and so we’re looking to recruit two to three new people to do this job. Uber volunteer Richard Taylor has been helping out recently, but this is really a job for two or more people.

You might very well ask ‘why two people, given the work is part time?’. The answer is that we really want every new policy to be cross-checked by two different people every time it is added or amended. This is to help eliminate possible mistakes, and prevent any unconscious biases.

We pay for this work on a piece work basis – £160 a time for a combination of one new policy authored, and one other policy double-checked. This money comes mainly from people making small donations, which I think helps keep everyone focussed on how important it is to get these right. We hope to add about two new policies a month, once the new team is up to speed.

If you’d like to be considered, please email hello@mysociety.org with ‘mspolicies’ in the subject line. Applications close 22nd November 2010.

I was just talking to someone in a local council about the fact that they’d opened up the location of 27,000 streetlights in their council area. They wanted to know if FixMyStreet could incorporate them so that problem reports could be more accurately attached.

This conversation reminded me that we’ve had an informal wish list of geodata for FixMyStreet for some time. What we need is more data that lets us send problems to the correct entity when the problem is not actually a council responsibility.

I’m just posting these up to see if anyone knows a guy who knows a girl who knows a dog who knows how to get hold of any of these datasets. In some vector data format, if possible, please!

• Canals and responsible authorities
• Supermarkets (esp car parks) and responsible companies
• Network Rail’s land
• Council owned land
• Land and roads controlled by the Highways agency
• Shopping malls
• National parks
• BT phone boxes (the original problem which inspired FixMyStreet)

So, do you know someone who might know someone who can help us improve FixMyStreet? And guess what, if we do add this to our web services, you’ll probably be able to query them too.

We’ve added a variety of new features to our postcode and point administrative area database, MaPit, in the past month – new data (Super Output Areas and Crown dependency postcodes), new functionality (more geographic functions, council shortcuts, and JSONP callback), and most interestingly for most people, a way of browsing all the data on the site.

• Firstly, we have some new geographic functions to join touches – overlaps, covered, covers, and coverlaps. These do as you would expect, enabling you to see the areas that overlap, cover, or are covered by a particular area, optionally restricted to particular types of area. ‘coverlaps’ returns the areas either overlapped or covered by a chosen area – this might be useful for questions such as “Tell me all the Parliamentary constituencies fully or partly within the boundary of Manchester City Council” (three of those are entirely covered by the council, and two overlap another council, Salford or Trafford).
• As you can see from that link, nearly everything on MaPit now has an HTML representation – just stick “.html” on the end of a JSON URI to see it. This makes it very easy to explore the data contained within MaPit, linking areas together and letting you view any area on Google Maps (e.g. Rutland Council on a map). It also means every postcode has a page.
• From a discussion on our mailing list started by Paul Waring, we discovered that the NSPD – already used by us for Northern Ireland postcodes – also contains Crown dependency postcodes (the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man) – no location information is included, but it does mean that given something that looks like a Crown dependency postcode, we can now at least tell you if it’s a valid postcode or not for those areas.
• Next, we now have all Lower and Middle Super Output Areas in the system; thanks go to our volunteer Anna for getting the CD and writing the import script. These are provided by ONS for small area statistics after the 2001 census, and it’s great that you can now trivially look up the SOA for a postcode, or see what SOAs are within a particular ward. Two areas are in MaPit for each LSOA and MSOA – one has a less accurate boundary than the other for quicker plotting, and we thought we might as well just load it all in. The licences on the CD (Conditions of supply of SOA boundaries and Ordnance Survey Output Area Licence) talk about a click-use licence, and a not very sraightforward OS licence covering only those SOAs that might share part of a boundary with Boundary-Line (whichever ones those are), but ONS now use the Open Government Licence, Boundary-Line is included in OS OpenData, various councils have published their SOAs as open data (e.g. Warwickshire), and these areas should be publicly available under the same licences.
• As the UK has a variety of different types of council, depending on where exactly you are, the postcode lookup now includes a shortcuts dictionary in its result, with two keys, “council” and “ward”. In one-tier areas, the values will simply by the IDs of that postcode’s council and ward (whether it’s a Metropolitan district, Unitary authority, London borough, or whatever); in two-tier areas, the values will again be dictionaries with keys “district” and “council”, pointing at the respective IDs. This should hopefully make lookups of councils easier.
• Lastly, to enable use directly on other sites with JavaScript, MaPit now sends out an “Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *” header, and allows you to specify a JSON callback with a callback parameter (e.g. put “?callback=foo” at the end of your query to have the JSON results wrapped in a call to the foo() function). JSONP calls will always return a 200 response, to enable the JavaScript to access the contents – look for the “error” key to see if something went wrong.

Phew! I hope you find this a useful resource for getting at administrative geographic data; please do let us know of any uses you make of the site.

A number of non-departmental government bodies / quangos have been named as being up for abolition, merger, privatisation or absorption into parent departments, as part of the Coalition Government’s Spending Review, due this autumn. This has been widely dubbed in the press as a “bonfire of the quangos“.  The list of quangos up for review is still being compiled by the government, and there have been a number of clarifications, amendments and retractions as further details come to light.

The Telegraph has obtained and published today a leaked list of 177 quangos up for abolition, plus a further 200 that are still being reviewed.

This is a great opportunity to highlight that mySociety’s Freedom of Information site WhatDoTheyKnow covers nearly all of these little-known bodies that spend public money (we currently have just over 3,800 public authorities listed on the site).  Given their impending doom, there is little time left to find out what they spent public funds on, as only their most important records will be transferred to the National Archives or successor bodies for permanent storage.  The remainder are likely to be shredded, or deleted, as only “records identified as valuable for future administrative need” are kept.

You can see our annotated list of the Telegraph’s list here - our volunteers have added links to most of the bodies’ pages on WhatDoTheyKnow, so you can more easily make your final FOI requests to them…

Please send any missing contact details to the WhatDoTheyKnow team.

Ever got a problem fixed by reporting it on FixMyStreet? Written to your representative via WriteToThem? Here’s an opportunity to pay the favour forward to someone stranded on a wet Wednesday by the non-arrival of the number seven bus.

We’ve reached the point in FixMyTransport development where we can start asking for your help. We need to fill in the information we’ll use to report people’s transport problems to the companies that run bus and train routes. If you have five minutes to spare, please spend them adding a contact email address or two for your local bus companies to this spreadsheet:

http://bit.ly/aVZzlb

…then you can bask in the glory of a karmic balance restored*.

* Will also work if you accidentally ran over a kitten on your way to work this morning.

mySociety is looking for someone who loves building relationships, and who enjoys thinking about travel, property and what makes for a great day out.

We are a non-profit group of staff and volunteers that builds websites that help people do things like find out how their politicians vote, or get broken street lights and potholes fixed in their road. We make most of our charitable money through commercial means, and to that end we’re setting up a spin-off called Mapumental Ltd that is building web mapping tools the likes of which have never been seen before. Watch this video to learn more.

Mapumental’s underlying technology is now complete, and ready for user-facing products to be built on top. What we need is someone who can do the market research to work out what products we should build, and who can go out and sell them to clients of all shapes and sizes – from holidaymakers to property firms.

Skills

• Market analysis – to research what products we should and shouldn’t be building with Mapumental
• Sales and marketing – to tell people authentic, convincing stories about how our products can help them, and sell the finished products
• Good copywriting skills – and ability to work with designers to create marketing materials

Experience

• At least 12 months experience selling products or services, ideally to corporate clients.
• Ideally, more than two years’ experience in product management, market research, or marketing
• First degree in any subject
• You’ll be able to tell us how you made tricky but successful marketing decisions

Personal Qualities

• Most important – you’ll need to be able to meet and collaborate with a diverse range of people, both colleagues and customers, in an amiable, confidence-inspiring manner
• Preferably – an interest in maps and the internet.
• You’ll have to be a self-starter who can work independently, and often in a location of your choosing
• Enthusiasm for new things, new ideas, new businesses

Location, Hours and Salary

We can be flexible between a minimum of 3.5 days per week, up to full time. You can live and work anywhere in the UK, but your life will be easier if it is within a couple of hours of both London and Birmingham.

We offer a salary of £33k+, and we are also offering a decent bonus tied to success at sales.

Applications should be sent to hello@mysociety.org by noon of 13th September, with the tag msjob5  in the subject line. This is a re-advertisement of a previously advertised position, and previous applicants need not apply.

The Head of Operations and Finance is a new post at mySociety, responsible for leading the commercial, financial and legal aspects of our work. Once appointed, the person will act as a member of the senior management team, contribute to the ongoing strategic development of mySociety, and report to the Board as required.

Organisational Context

This is a newly created, full-time role as an employee of mySociety Ltd, reporting to the Board. The successful applicant will work alongside the CEO/Director of mySociety Ltd to further the aims of the company’s parent organisation (the charity UK Citizens Online Democracy, aka UKCOD) and to ensure the financial and operational success of mySociety Ltd.

mySociety aims to build websites that give people simple, tangible benefits in the civic and community aspects of their lives, and funds its work partially through the provision of commercial software products and consulting. mySociety currently has seven full-time staff (soon to expand to 15) and has a projected overall income budget for 2010 of £609,000, funded by a wide range of donors, private foundations and commercial contracts. The Head of Operations and Finance will directly manage four professional staff.

Key Responsibilities and Deliverables:

1. Lead for mySociety on the development of commercial opportunities, products and service lines (including marketing, inbound lead response, meetings, pricing and contract negotiations, and other customary business development tasks).
2. Deliver commercial contracts including commercial rollout of e-petitions product to local authorities and certain other projects (excluding Mapumental).
3. With the CEO, allocate resources between UKCOD and commercial activities, determine work priorities and manage delivery of an agreed plan for UKCOD and its subsidiaries.
4. Create and run a robust system for financial planning and reporting, preparing monthly management accounts and cash flow forecasts, and preparing forward-looking financial updates for the boards of the charity and its trading subsidiaries.
5. With the CEO, develop the annual board-level strategy for the charity and its trading subsidiaries, to formulate and track agreed strategic goals and metrics, reporting back to the Board on progress.
6. Manage key stakeholder relationships, including major commercial clients, professional service suppliers, regulatory authorities, major funding bodies of the charity (current and potential), and other organisations with similar aims to the charity (in the UK and overseas).
7. With the CEO, manage the Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) Project Coordinator to successfully deliver on our project goals in conjunction with our funding partners the Open Society Institute.
8. With the CEO, manage the Africa Project Co-ordinator to successfully deliver on project goals in conjunction with Omidyar Network.
9. Manage the mySociety Office Manager and the Communications & Marketing Manager to ensure that they carry out tasks in accordance with their job descriptions.

Person Specification

Must have:

• Experience as a financial controller, business manager with finance responsibilities, accountant, or similar positions.
• At least 10 years of managerial experience, including at least 5 years managing professional teams, and taking responsibility for P&L of a business unit or as budget holder in a public sector or non-profit context.
• Knowledge and experience of working with technology teams.
• Analytical and financial skills, including problem solving, data analysis, and financial projections.
• Experience of managing and resolving compliance issues.
• A passion for democracy and transparency issues and views on how technology can help.
• A level of interpersonal and communication skills which enable the post holder to establish credibility with a wide range of contacts within and outside mySociety.
• Ability to devise imaginative solutions by developing novel ideas or adapting existing ones in new ways.
• The ability to assess and anticipate stakeholder needs and expectations.

Ideally would have:

• Some experience of the developing world.
• Previous experience/knowledge of not for profit organisations, charities accounting and reporting to non-executive boards.
• A high order of negotiating skills and the capacity to present ideas and issues with authority.
• Readiness to make decisions and render judgments based on logical evaluation of all the relevant factors.
• An understanding of how to introduce systems and processes in a complex organistion that mixes paid staff and volunteers.
• Proven ability to line-manage and work with colleagues who work from home, primarily using email and instant messaging.

Salary: £45k+. Location: Flexible with some travel within the UK. Application Process: Send a CV and covering letter to hello@mysociety.org with the tag msjob4 in the subject line by noon on 10th August 2010.

I’m very pleased to announce that mySociety’s upgraded point and postcode lookup service, MaPit, is public and available to all. It can tell you about administrative areas, such as councils, Welsh Assembly constituencies, or civil parishes, by various different lookups including name, point, or postcode. It has a number of features not available elsewhere as far as I know, including:

• Full Northern Ireland coverage – we found a free and open dataset from the Office of National Statistics, called NSPD Open, available for a £200 data supply charge. We’ve paid that and uploaded it to our data mirror under the terms of the licence, so you don’t have to pay – if you feel like contributing to the charity that runs mySociety to cover our costs in this, please donate! :-)
• Actual boundaries – for any specific area, you can get the co-ordinates of the boundary in either KML, JSON, or WKT – be warned, some can be rather big!
• Point lookup – given a point, in any geometry PostGIS knows about, it can tell you about all the areas containing that point, from parish and ward up to European electoral region.
• History – large scale boundary changes will be stored as new areas; as of now, this means the site contains the Westminster constituency boundaries from both before and after the 2010 general election, queryable just like current areas.

If you wish to use our service commercially or are considering high-volume usage, please get in touch to discuss options; the data and source code are available under their respective licences from the site. I hope this service may prove useful – we will slowly be migrating our own sites to use this service (FixMyStreet has already been done and already seems a bit nippier), so it should hopefully be quite reliable.

Thanks must go to the bodies releasing this open data that we can build upon and provide these useful services, and everyone involved in working towards the release of the data. Thanks also to everyone behind GeoDjango and PostGIS, making working with polygons and shapefiles a much nicer experience than it was back in 2004.

FixMyTransport is the most challenging project mySociety has ever tried to build. It’s so ambitious that we’re taking the unusual move of breaking off part of the problem and stress-testing it in the form of the new mini-site Brief Encounters, which has gone live today. It was built by Louise Crow, or Crowbot, as we know her, with design support from Dave Whiteland.

Brief Encounters is not, as the name might suggest, mySociety’s long awaited attempt at a dating site. Instead it’s a place where people can share whimsical stories about unusual things that happened them them, or other people, on public transport. We hope you’ll have a go, read some examples and then contribute your own.

You might be thinking that a whimsical story site doesn’t sound very mySocietyish – and you’d be right. Brief Encounters is actually a technology test-bed to help us crack a new design and data problem: how do you make it as easy as possible for users to pinpoint a specific bus stop, or train route, or a ferry port, as easily as possible? There are over 300,000 such beasties, and nobody has ever really tried to build an interface that makes it easy to find each one quickly and reliably.

So, what we want from you, dear readers, is three fold. We want:

1. Stories – the more hilarious or sob-inducing the better
2. Feedback on the user experience – how can we make finding a route or node easier?
3. Feedback on any data problems you find, ie “My bus stop is missing” – we’re going to have to patch our data with your help, there’s just no other way

For those of you tech minded, the project is built in Ruby and uses the NaPTAN dataset of stations, bus stops and ferry terminals, the National Public Transport Gazetteer database of towns and settlements in the UK, and the National Public Transport Data Repository of sample public transport journeys, from 2008. The first two datasets are free of charge, and the third one mySociety pays for.

Lastly, kudos must go to the hyper-imaginative Nicky Getgood who suggested we collect stories on FixMyTransport, as well as problem reports.

Have you used WhatDoTheyKnow to make a Freedom of Information request?

If so, you can now add your photograph to the site, and some text on your user page about what you’re researching. This can include links to your blog, campaign page or twitter feed.

To add this to your profile, first log into WhatDoTheyKnow, and go to your user page by choosing “my requests”.

There are then links to add a profile photo and/or set some text about you, and what you’re using FOI for.

I’d go and do it while I remember – it will help you and others find and understand each other, hopefully leading to that little bit more collaborative research!

On Twitter about 15 minutes ago, @greenerleith asked: “Has anyone worked out how to display the most recent #fixmystreet reports on a local map widget that can be embedded? #hyperlocal”

Like this? :)

View Larger Map

It’s very simple to do:

1. Go to FixMyStreet, and locate any RSS feed of the latest reports you want (for the above map, I used Edinburgh Waverley’s postcode of EH1 1BB; you could have used reports to a particular council, or ward, using the Local alerts section). Copy the URL of the RSS feed.
2. Go to Google Maps, paste the RSS feed URL into its search box, and click Search Maps.
3. Click the “Link” link to the top right of the map, and copy the “Paste HTML to embed in website” code.
4. Paste that code into your blog post, sidebar, or wherever (you can alter the code to change its size etc.).
5. Done. :-)

The latest reports from FixMyStreet, superimposed on a Google Map, embedded in your blog. Hope that’s helpful.

mySociety, the non-profit project that built TheyWorkForYou and FixMyStreet is seeking a West Midlands based Commercial Product Manager to drive the success of its new commercial subsidiary Mapumental Ltd

The job will entail working with the developers to design commercial products based on our  Mapumental mapping technology, and will involve carrying out all the sales and marketing required to secure contracts based on them.

Skills

Software as a service product design

Sales and Marketing

Strong copywriting skills, and ability to work with designers to produce marketing materials

Good knowledge of online mapping and GIS

Experience

Must have experience of selling software as a service

Must show proof of having made difficult and successful product design decisions.

Must have experience carrying out marketing campaigns

Must be Internet savvy

Ideally familiar with the GIS sector

Personal Qualities

Self starter who can work independently, and at home.

Driven to make a new business succeed

Attention to detail

Friendly and able to collaborate with diverse colleagues

Location and Hours

The job is full time and is to be based in the West Midlands (exact location TBD)

Applications should be sent to hello@mysociety.org by noon of 21st June, with the tag msjob3 in the subject line.

The two days leading up to election day are a hugely important time for less politically-obsessive voters. The parties know that a lot of people are only starting to seriously think how to vote today and tomorrow, and TheyWorkForYou saw its biggest spike ever the day before the election, way back in 2005.

This means it’s a super-important time to get trustworthy, non-partisan information in front of as many people as possible. And you can help by doing the following simple things:

1. Go to your constituency page on the TheyWorkForYou Election Quiz and take a good look at the answers. Is there anything surprising in the answers? Has anyone failed to respond who really shouldn’t? Is there anything funny in the responses? Make a couple of notes about what you think are the most interesting findings.

2. If you know the name of your local papers or radio stations, try to Google for the email or phone number of the news desk. If you don’t know the names, try sticking the name of your nearest town into a media database like this, to get a phone number or email address.

3. If possible, you should start your pitch by phoning rather than emailing. If you get a phone number for a news desk, give them a bell and say that you’re a volunteer from “The country’s largest non-partisan election information project”, and ask for the email of a specific person who might be interested in a story about what local candidates are saying.

4. Once you have an email address of a specific journalist, compose a locally specific email for them, along the following lines:

“Hi X,

I’m a resident of Z constituency, and this election I’ve been one of 6000 volunteers helping  to build an unprecedented project to get candidates across the country to go on the record, in conjunction with the website TheyWorkForYou.com. It’s a strictly non-partisan project, aimed at giving voters a really clear, spin-free view of what their candidates stand for. I’d really appreciate it if you could give it some coverage before election day.

In my constituency, N candidates have completed our survey. From this we can see some quite interesting things, namely:

* Candidate A thinks…

* Candidate B thinks…

Would you be so kind as to print a story encouraging people to check our their candidates via TheyWorkForYou.com, and mentioning some of the highlights I’ve included?

all the best,

Your name, email, phone”

5. An hour after you send the email through, give the journalist a call back to see if they need any more help.

6. If you do this, please leave us a comment on this post so we know who’s had a go!

Thank you for helping spread some non-partisan information this election time, and enjoy the election…

Thanks to the work of thousands of volunteers across the country, we’ve now launched our survey of candidates to be your MP.

View the survey results

It tells you the views of candidates on a range of national and local issues. What’s particular exciting is that this is individual views – we separately surveyed all the candidates.

About 1/3rd of them have replied. The survey has a tool to let you ask the other candidates in your constituency to respond. Please give it a go, as we’d like to the survey to get as complete as possible over the weekend, to be most use to people in the last days leading up to the election.

Competition! Have you found an inventive way to ask your candidates to respond to the survey? Maybe you doorstepped them, or sent them a cake. Post your ideas and things you’ve done in the comments below.

As you may know, TheyWorkForYou are conducting a survey of candidates for Parliament. You can view the questions for your constituency on this list.

Quite a few people have been asking how we worked out the questions. There are two parts to this, one local and one national.

Local questions

We used the power of volunteers.

Thousands of DemocracyClub members were asked to suggest local issues in there area. These were then edited by other volunteers, to have consistent grammar, and be worded as statements to agree/disagree with, and filtered to remove national issues. The full criteria and examples are available.

You can view the issues for any constituency on the DemocracyClub site. They are in the “local questions” tab. e.g. For Liverpool, Riverside (where I live) you would go here.

We’ve ended up with local issues for about 85% of constituencies. They’re really interesting and high quality, and quite unique for a national survey.

Thank you to all the volunteers who helped make this happen!

National questions

This was hard, because we felt that asking more than 15 questions would make the survey too long. We also wanted to be sure it was non-partisan.

We convened a panel of judges, either from mySociety/Democracy Club or with professional experience in policy, and from across the political spectrum. They were:

• James Crabtree, chair of judges, trustee of mySociety, journalist for Prospect magazine
• Tim Green, Democracy club developer, Physics student, Cambridge University.
• Michael Hallsworth, senior researcher, Institute for Government.
• Will Davies, sociologist at University of Oxford, has worked for left of centre policy think tanks such as IPPR and Demos.
• Andrew Tucker, researcher at Birkbeck, worked for Liberal Democrats from 1996-2000.
• Robert McIlveen, research fellow, Environment and Energy unit at Policy Exchange, did PhD on Conservative party election strategy.

They met at the offices of the Institute for Government, and had a 3 hour judging session on 29th March 2010. They were asked to think of 8-15 questions, with multiple choice answers, which could usefully be answered both by members of the public and prospective candidates for national office.

To ensure maximum transparency, the discussions of the judges were recorded. You can download the recordings in two parts: part 1, part 2 (2 hours, 20 mins total).

Details of the broad framework the judges operated under are given by the chair of judges, James Crabtree, a trustee of mySociety, in the opening to the recordings.

Please do ask any questions in the comments below.

The following is a message that we’d like to see emailed around within political parties of all stripes. If you work for a party, or know anyone who does, please send it along:

———-

Hi there,

TheyWorkForYou.com has sent online surveys to nearly 3000 candidates
across the UK, including most of your party’s candidates. If you don’t know it, TheyWorkForYou is probably the largest politician transparency website in the UK, with about 3m visitors last year.

The survey we’ve sent is a rigorously neutral attempt to clarify candidates positions on many of the biggest issues at the election. It is also a long-term document – the data that comes from candidate responses will be viewed millions of times between now and the general election after this one. It also contains both local and national questions.

There are 6000+ volunteers now nagging non-responsive candidate.  You can help your party improve its responsiveness rating, here, but passing on the word that TheyWorkForYou’s survey is not push-polling, not single issue, not short-termist:
http://www.democracyclub.org.uk/twfy/chart/

Please help us by passing on the message that TheyWorkForYou will be one of the main ways that new MPs from all parties (and none) will be scrutinised and neither we nor new MPs want to start our relationship with a “refused to go on the record” badge on their pages.

If you are a candidate, and you want to do the survey, check your email for TheyWorkForYou (no spaces). If you don’t have it, drop a mail to developers@democracyclub.org.uk and it’ll be sent along shortly.

many thanks,

The staff and volunteers at TheyWorkForYou and Democracy Club

In January last year, at our yearly staff and volunteers retreat, we decided that TheyWorkForYou should do something special for the general election. We decided that we wanted to gather information on where every candidate in every seat stood on what most people would think were the biggest issues, not just nationally but locally too.

Our reasons for setting this ambitious goal were two fold. First, we thought that pinning people down to a survey that didn’t reward rhetorical flourishes would help the electorate cut through the spin that accompanies all elections. But even more important was to increase our ability to hold new MPs to account: we want users of TheyWorkForYou in the future to be able to see how Parliamentary voting records align with campaign statements.

This meant doing quite a lot of quite difficult things:

1. Working out who all the candidates are (thousands of them)
2. Working out how to contact them.
3. Gathering thousands of local issues from every corner of the country, and quality assuring them.
4. Developing a balanced set of national issues.
5. Sending the candidates surveys,  and chasing them up.

The Volunteer Army

This has turned out to be a massive operation, requiring  the creation of the independent Democracy Club set up by the amazing new volunteers Seb Bacon and Tim Green,  and an entire candidate database site YourNextMP, built by another new volunteer Edmund von der Burg.  Eventually we managed to get at least one local issue in over 80% of constituencies, aided by nearly 6000 new volunteers spread from Lands End to John O’Groats. There’s at least one volunteer in every constituency in Great Britain, and in all but three in Northern Ireland. Volunteers have done more than just submit issues, they’ve played our duck house game (you can still win!)  to help gather thousands of email addresses, phone numbers, and postal addresses.

The Survey

What we ended up with is a candidate survey that is different for every constituency – 650 different surveys, in short. The survey always contains the same 15 national issues (chosen by a politically balanced panel held at the Institute for Government)  and then anything between zero and ten local issues. We’ve seen everything from cockle protection to subsidies for ferries raised – over 3000 local issues were submitted, before being painstakingly moderated, twice, by uber-volunteers checking for for spelling, grammar, obvious bias and straightforward interestingness (it isn’t really worth asking candidates if they are in favour of Good Things and against Bad Things).

In the last couple of days we’ve started to send out the first surveys – we’ve just passed 1000 emails, and there are at least 2000 still to be sent.

The Output

We’re aiming to release the data we are gathering on candidates positions on 30th April. We’ll build a nice interface to explore it, but we also hope that others will do something with what we are expecting to be quite a valuable dataset.

The Pressure

Candidates are busy people, so how do we get their attention? Happily, some candidates are choosing to answer the survey just because TheyWorkForYou has a well know brand in the political world, but this has limits.

The answer is that we are going to ask Democracy Club, and it’s army of volunteers to help. We’ll shortly roll out a tool that will tell volunteers which of their candidates haven’t taken the opportunity to go on the record , and provide a range of ways for them to push for their candidates to fill it in.

It would be a lie to say we’re confident we’ll get every last candidate. But we are confident we can make sure that no candidate can claim they didn’t see, or didn’t know it was important to their constituents. And every extra voice we have makes that more likely.

Join Democracy Club today